Hello, abjourne! If no one else has said so -- even if so -- welcome to the Forge.

I think a lot of people do the tier planning thing, at least informally. Certainly I have created D&D campaigns with villains at various levels. I might not even stat them out early on, just give them names and a handful of special powers (spell choices, magic items, feats) that help drive the story (the wizard is planning to use temporal stasis to assassinate the king, but he needs the spell components...).

How formally do you do the tiers? Do you have a system for planning the levels of the characters and the number of characters at each level? At the start of a campaign, when the PCs are still low level, how do you choose the level of your ultimate bigbadguy?

Do you ever decide, "oh, and there's a bigger fish behind him!" at the last minute?

I assume from the game title that the fame mechanic is pretty important. The PCs are rising to legendary status. What does that mean in terms of player (not character) power? As the characters grow in fame, do the players have more ability to do stuff in the game? Social stuff, or also adventure stuff?

I stopped playing D&D regularly in part due to the prep time. I can comfortably ad lib a fantastic D&D 3E game through level 5-6, where things start to need lots of prep. By level 12, the prep gets insane. When wizards start getting 9th level spells at 17th, I want to pull my hair out. I was already "drifting" the game away from its core story ("kill monsters and take their stuff and become more powerful") and running political and social adventures and I found it got harder and harder to do that the more the players leveled up their characters. In essence, the game was doing what it did so well that I couldn't do what I wanted to do (which was counter to the game philosophy). So I'm looking for a D&D replacement and I'm very curious to see what you're doing.

Regarding GM fiat, sure, I've let decisions be made by die rolls. All the time. Player: "Does the magical pawn shop have a +3 weapon to sell?" Me: "Uh, roll a 20 and it will." (Or: "Make a Search check, DC 30, and it will.") Letting GM fiat decisions be made by die roll is a clever and useful technique that groups use to let players believe that the GM isn't really fiat'ing everything, when he still is, since he knows the probabilities. Best, the group is in on the joke (they know the probabilities, too), so it's at least in the open.

Can you tell me a little about Rise 2 Legends, especially how it differs from D&D since we both have that common reference point, and give some actual play examples that show how those rules rock?

I recommend you post a short instance of play. I think your post got the big tacit internet nod because you didn't really tell us much about your game. In fact, at first skim, I thought it was a D&D post without any meat, and only on a closer read did I realize you were talking about a game design. If you'd show us more of a game session -- more from the player side than the character side -- we could better see how Rise 2 Legends works!

More later, but quickly I want to say that I think your post received as little attention it did not because people aren't interested in more traditional-style fantasy RPGs, but because you didn't really give people much to talk about in your first post here. I'm trying to draw out some stuff to talk about -- maybe other folks will jump in now.

With this information in hand I go to work, I re-evaluate the pyramid & setting, adding & dropping things. I select a bottom tier villain & script an introductory adventure & I plot the heroes Karma Check list. (More on that latter). Then I take them thru it. Each session from there on consists of the heroes resolving a dilemma or me introducing new ones based upon their choices & my tier. Every three levels the heroes attain a higher rank of fame & I drop a hook to higher level to the tier & tougher opponents.

I would be interested to hear more about your systematic approach here and what I take to be a karma checklist? I have experiment with organising character-based through-lines organised by session, so would be keen to here of your experiences in what seems to be a similar exercise. I like your link of the tiering with a fame mechanic, that looks like a natural fit and a good idea.

Okay, I have a little time to respond. It sounds like you're doing with your tier system what I do informally when planning a D&D campaign: think about the bigbadguys, give them some minions, give their minions some minions, etc. It sounds like you work strictly top-down. I work from both ends and meet in the middle. That is, I plan from the top and also from the lowest level peons that the PCs will encounter first, and work towards a common middle.

That sounds pretty cool, and I'd be interested to see a specific example of how you have gone from a specified character to such checklist.

Also, in your experience, do you find the table actually and directly useful? That is, even with the roll process, do you ever find you just can't come up with anything? How many items appear on a given chart; is a chart as big as it needs to be to describe the character, or is it a case of judging which of all the characters interests are most necessary to represent?